the Livery Lorax

Up where I live, there are no yellow cabs. There are pretty occasionally livery cabs, which are the shiny black towncars that one calls when one is “Calling a car.” Technically (legally, I guess) they are not supposed to pick up “street hails.” In my neighborhood, that doesn’t matter.

[There is a separate post in here about the “unofficial livery drivers,” who stand around the corner by the Dunkin’ Donuts. If you can’t find a real livery car, you can walk up to the group, and say, “Taxi?” One of them will take you to their car or van, and drive you to wherever you want for ten dollars. I find this incredibly convenient. Matt is a little freaked out that I do this.]

Moving on… Last night I slept through the night for the first time in several days. I haven’t been taking seroquel, because it makes me very sleepy of a morning, and I’ve wanted to get right up. And I’m out of selexa, my daily anti-anxiety, and have been since the wedding. (Come on, health care bill!) But I took some last night, and finally slept.

I woke up struggling to get really awake, and needing to rush. I also had brownies to take for my kids, and a giant piece of cardboard to fashion with the stage crew into a moon for Titania’s bed. And it was snowing, snowing, snowing.

So I hailed a livery cab. Actually, I think all the livery drivers around here know I occasionally take them, because often when one passes me, they honk lightly. If I want one, I turn my head and nod.

The snow was beautiful, and Leo (the driver) and I both mentioned it. As we passed by the zoo and the botanical garden, I mentioned how pretty the snow-covered trees in the zoo were. He gestured to the garden, and said that the garden was so beautiful. I agreed, and said nothing as we drove by it, a long look at hundreds of trees, laden with snow.

He said, “You know that movie… the witch?” (English is his third or fourth language, not his first.) I said, excitedly, “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe?! Yes!” He said, “The garden looks…like that movie.” “Oh, yes, ” I agreed. It really does.

There was a beat while we exited, and turned onto our main boulevard. I’m guessing he said what he said next based on the enthusiasm of my response to the Narnia movie.

He said, “Do you ever think… trees are… alone?” I took him to mean, correctly, “lonely.” They did look lonely, some of them, standing there in the snow. “Yes, sure. I think maybe.” He said, “Like… in the jungle they are… there are living things.” I thought he meant that our city trees didn’t have much living habitation.

I said, “Yes, but I think— trees maybe have a different time. ” I was thinking of the Ents in Tolkien. I said, “Like, we humans are [gesturing rapid movement] rush, rush, rush, and animals are [gesturing] rush, rush rush. And trees are [slowing voice] in a longer kind of time.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Yes. But you know: the trees, they are living.”

“Yes,” I said, “You can tell– they’re living creatures like we are.” He nodded.

He said, “I will tell you. Yesterday? I saw a tree, I was walking? I put my hand on it [he mimes this], and then I–how do you say? [mimes hugging]”

I said, “Embrace. You hugged the tree?” He said, “Yes, yes. I want… it feeling inside, I can feel.”

I said, “It’s like: it’s energy, and energy moving inside it– it can influence the energy in you.”

He nodded eagerly: “Yes, yes.”

We were quiet for a few blocks. He said, “No one talks about this.” I agreed that no one really does.

As we turned the last corner before the school, he expressed amazement that some people don’t believe in creation (“I believe in creation and evolution,” he said) and said that we must be egotistical. Actually, he used a Spanish word for “egotistical” but it must be a cognate, because “ego” was its root, and I echoed, “Yes, egotistical.” Leo thinks that we build robots and things, and want to be the only creators, and forget that we also are some sort of creation.

After I got out of the car, and he opened the trunk to get out my giant cardboard piece, he said, “It’s good to talk. It helps the thinking.”

For the rest of the day, every odd tree I saw, I thought, “No one is wondering about you, tree.” Except for a very few.

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2 Responses

One of the side benefits of living in a multi-cultural city. I am not sure where else you could have that conversation, maybe Chicago. Funny I was noticing how lovely the trees looked today with snow on them like clothing. I also thought about how they shelter animals in this bad weather. There were deer feeding under the trees in the back yard, there must have been grass exposed there.